WIRED Awake July 3: Rogue drone disrupts flights at Gatwick

Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, a drone disrupted air traffic at Gatwick airport, NATO is investigating the NotPetya malware as the work of a state actor, China's second Long March 5 rocket launch has failed and more.

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A private drone caused disruption at Gatwick airport last night, forcing the runway to be closed and five flights to be diverted (BBC News). A Gatwick spokesperson said: The airport said: "Runway operations at Gatwick were suspended between 18:10 BST and 1819, and again from 1836 to 1841, resulting in a small number of go-arounds and diverts. Operations have resumed and the police continue to investigate". Drones are banned from flying near airports in the UK, and many have built-in geofencing locks to prevent them from coming close to places where they could present a risk to air traffic. The Civil Aviation Authority said: "It is totally unacceptable to fly drones close to airports and anyone flouting the rules can face severe penalties including imprisonment."

NATO has announced that the NotPetya malware "can most likely be attributed to a state actor" and has reiterated that "a cyber operation with consequences comparable to an armed attack" could be met with a military response (Gizmodo). Tomáš Minárik, researcher at NATO CCD COE Law Branch, said: "If the operation could be linked to an ongoing international armed conflict, then law of armed conflict would apply, at least to the extent that injury or physical damage was caused by it, and with respect to possible direct participation in hostilities by civilian hackers, but so far there are reports of neither". The international military organisation confirmed that the malware affected "multiple organisations in Ukraine, Europe, US and possibly Russia".

China's second launch using its new Long March 5 heavy lift rocket has failed to reach orbit, seemingly ditching in the Philippine Sea (Spaceflight Now). The rocket, which launched on Sunday from a spaceport in Hainan province successfully released four strap-on boosters and its payload fairing, but video coverage was then unexpectedly cut after showing the first stage separating from the rocket's second stage a minute later than scheduled. It was carrying the Shijian 18 communication satellite, which was set to be the first of a new high-speed data transfer fleet. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp has confirmed that the launch was unsuccessful and that investigators are looking into what caused the problem. The failure casts a shadow over Chinese plans to launch a robotic moon mission on a Long March 5 later this year.

The High Court has granted human rights group Liberty permission to challenge the government in court over the provisions of the Investigatory Powers Act, often referred to as the Snoopers' Charter by critics of the law (WIRED). The human rights organisation is set to challenge the bulk powers included in the Act. This includes bulk hacking of devices, interception of data and the creation of bulk personal datasets. It raised £50,000 in crowdfunding to finance the judicial review, which was raised in just one week. Before the challenge heads to court, it will need a judge to approve a 'costs cap' on the case.

TechCrunch reports that Microsoft is planning to lay off "thousands" of sales staff worldwide as part of an internal restructuring project that will see sales teams focus on cloud services, presumably as opposed to more traditional volume licensing of software. The move, which is reportedly connected to a change of leadership in the company's marketing division earlier this year, is set to affect Microsoft's enterprise and SME customer divisions. The firm declined to comment but TechCrunch understands that an official announcement will be made this week.

The Mexican government is enlisting the aid of dolphins trained by the US Navy to help save the last members of the critically endangered vaquita species of porpoise (BBC News). The project, which is due to begin in September, will use the dolphins to find and herd vaquitas into a marine refuge. Environment Minister Rafael Pacchiano said: "We've spent the past year working alongside the US Navy with a group of dolphins they had trained to search for missing scuba divers. We've been training them to locate the vaquitas. We have to guarantee we capture the largest possible number of vaquitas to have an opportunity to save them".

Seen in daylight or illuminated by neon and bright lights, amusement parks look like a lot of fun. The rides, the games, the cotton candy and fried food. Seen in the dead of night, they look haunted, even apocalyptic (WIRED). Stefano Cerio taps that creepiness in his photo book Night Games. He prowls amusement parks in the wee hours, when still rides, vacant playgrounds, and forgotten machinery are their spookiest. "I like to see these amusement parks when they’re empty," he says. "Amusement parks are designed to be full, so when you see something completely different, it can be nightmarish".

Seat 41c is a free online sci-fi anthology that has invited some of the world's best-known authors to create a story from a single seed: a flight from Tokyo to San Francisco jump forward 20 years in time (Ars Technica). The anthology includes 22 very different takes on the theme by authors including Margaret Atwood, Eileen Gunn, Bruce Sterling and Chen Qiufan. Writers are also invited to submit their own fiction, based on the same story seed, to win a $10,000 from organisers XPRIZE.

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Star Trek: Discovery showrunners Aaron Harberts and Gretchen J. Berg plan to routinely kill off major characters in a move inspired by the success of HBO's Game of Thrones (Entertainment Weekly). Harberts said: "Death isn’t treated gratuitously on this show. It’s not for shock value. But when it happens we want to make sure that people really feel it". Star Trek: Discovery comes to Netflix in the UK on September 25, a day after its US premiere on CBS All Access.

Developer Kevan Davis has turned Wikipedia into an online text adventure, complete with engagingly fuzzy pixellated art and an Infocom-inspired cover illustration (Ars Technica). The game prompts you to choose from a random selection of geographic locations as your starting point, and from there you can navigate your way to nearby places, collect objects – we picked up the Statue of Zeus at Olympia – and experience the encyclopaedia's trove of knowledge in a new way. The source code for Davis's project, which began in 2015, is also available to download from GitHub.

N, N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is famous for producing one of the most intense psychedelic experiences possible, catapulting users into a series of vivid, incapacitating hallucinations. But despite the kaleidoscope of variation on offer, the enduring mystery of DMT is the encounters it induces with 'entities' or 'aliens': "jewelled self-dribbling basketballs" or "machine elves", as the psychedelic missionary Terence McKenna described them. "They’re really amazing, spine-tingling ideas," says Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College, London. "But, you know, arguably they’re bullshit."

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